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Arachne: A Literary Journal. No. 1

(II) A Fiasco Of Romanticism

(II) A Fiasco Of Romanticism

Kierkegaard was a romantic, but he took a critical view of his own romantic position. In Sartre we witness the complete breakdown of romanticism. This can be illustrated under the three heads of 'contingency'; 'irony'; and 'the single one'. The continental romantics betrayed a keen awareness of the reality of contingency, and this awareness has been handed on to the existentialists. Sartre heroically faces in his philosophy the fact of contingency in its bare nakedness. But whereas the romantics found pleasure in the inexplicable irrationality of the contingent, Sartre is offended by it. In him it causes an all-pervading nausea from which he does not permit himself to escape through the backdoor of Platonism either. The eternal verities have gone, and rightly so, for they are, to quote Thomas Merton, 'the big sin of Platonism'2 Kierkegaard, full of scorn for the Hegelian logic which issues into a 'unity of contrasts', had taken over from the romantics their logic of 'irony', a logic which regards the 'cleavage' as the ultimate reality: 'that the two halves of an idea are held asunder by something foreign intervening', 'that an unsatisfied craving has called it into being, yet has failed to find satisfaction in it'. Here, existence and essence are separated by a rigid 'boundary'— a boundary which Kierkegaard still believed he could pass by means of 'the category of the absurd', or, simply, by an act of faith. To Sartre, this passage is closed, and so man is in his sight for ever doomed to failure in his attempt to realise his self.—And finally, the romantic is essentially 'the single one'. Communion with the other never comes naturally to him; it always involves the task of crossing a 'barrier'. This has been so ever since the romantic movement took its origin among the medieval troubadours in the South of France. For the troubadour was 'the single one' in a very real sense as the unmarried retainer who addressed his love to the life of his lord. In modern times, Kierkegaard made very much of the category of 'the single one'. To him the page 19 individual was 'a closed system' open only to God. With Sartre, this last source of communication has gone, and the individual consequently becomes a closed system in a very radical sense. We have then in Satre a romantic who has cast aside everything on which the romantic depends for his happiness: Logical inconsistencies, metaphysical flights of imagination, or revealed religion.